Fragrant Harbour (18 page)

I didn’t even bother pretending to resist her charm. 

Hong Kong, when I arrived back there in the spring of 1946, was beginning to recover. The water and power supplies worked, buses and trams ran, streets were clean, shops and schools were open, and people had returned from China, which had gone back to civil war.

Those were the busiest years of my life. Hong Kong was
recovering
, business was picking up, the hotel was getting back on its feet. I seemed to be working all day every day, and yet when I think back I can also remember spending weekends walking on Lantao; staying at friends’ houses there and on Cheung Chau and in the New Territories; boat trips; visits to Macao; a fairly energetic social life. I was also going to a study group led by Professor Cobb, who had spent a year in England recuperating and then returned to take up his place at Hong Kong University. The subject was classical Chinese literature, and involved me
learning written Chinese. I carried flash cards around with me in my jacket pockets and in spare moments would look at them and memorise characters; I remember doing this on the Peak Tram, the Star Ferry, before meetings, in the loo at dinner
parties
. I loved the way you could carry the language around with you in your pocket. I suppose the cards were what would later have been called a security blanket. Before very long I knew two thousand characters and had a reasonable reading knowledge of basic Chinese.

I also began seeing a girl. Her name was Amanda Howarth, and she had come out to work for Jardines. She was staying with her aunt and uncle; he was a bigwig at the Hong. We met in late 1947 on somebody’s Sunday boat trip out to Clear Water Bay. She had very fair skin, always wore a hat and often carried a parasol, but liked the heat. The first time I saw her, she was
sitting
in a circle at the rear end of the boat, under the awning. She was being urged, partly teasingly, to tell everyone the story of a secret admirer at her office, who left her flowers and little
presents
and eerily infallible horse-racing tips in a red New Year’s envelope. She was laughing, and everyone else was laughing too. She was pretty but the most attractive thing about her was her evident talent for happiness. We bumped into each other a few times more at dinners and dances and things took their course. I took her to a tea house to test her flexibility, and she ordered a dish of tripe and jellyfish. The waiter sided with me, and tried to warn her off.

‘Too stinky,’ he said. ‘Not for English people.’

Amanda insisted, the dish came, and was indeed very difficult to eat, not because it was stinky – it had almost no smell – but because of its slithery texture.

‘He must have learned stinky as a useful all-purpose word for putting off Europeans,’ I said. We had eaten about a third of the dish and I had hidden the rest in a handkerchief to save face. We both began giggling.

‘Thank you,’ Amanda said when the waiter came to take away our plates. ‘That was execrable.’ He gave me a suspicious look. ‘Too stinky’ became our code phrase.

‘She seems like a nice girl,’ Beryl said, the first time they met. I could hear unspoken things in her voice and ignored them. Beryl
Marler was my new friend. She had been on the
Abergavenny
on the way back to England; I had barely seen her then, and when I did she was subdued, more so than she had been in camp. But she was also on the boat back out to Hong Kong, the
Pride
of
Wessex
, and in much more energetic form. She was going out to take over the business, for a while anyway.

‘It’s what Albert would have wanted,’ she told me in the bar. I had not noticed – it had been concealed by her husband’s noisier and more visible presence – but she was a tremendous gin drinker, the sort who keeps up a steady rate of imbibition without any visible effect apart from a slight improvement in mood. I gradually learnt to pace myself by having one drink for every two of hers.

‘I thought about going home and just sitting around being a widow but it wouldn’t have suited me. That’s the trouble about the East, it spoils you for the parish council. Bert couldn’t have borne the thought of having his businesses just fall apart into nothing. So I’m going to sit on the board and boss them about and generally keep an eye on things.’

I have to admit that it sounded like a bad idea to me: I thought she would be out of her depth, and that Marler’s business
associates
would eat her alive. I kept that prognosis to myself, though, and we became friends through a process which seemed about acknowledging shared history as much as anything. We were both working very hard, as was everyone in the colony; it was as if there was a general agreement to seek amnesia through absorbed effort. Kipling, when he visited Hong Kong in the early years of the century, was impressed by the fact that he never saw a Chinese asleep in the daytime.

1949 was the decisive year in the history of Hong Kong, the time everything changed. Mao and the Communists won the civil war. The Kuomintang packed up and fled to Taiwan. A long time afterwards, Cooper, by now one of the most important people in the Bank, told me that when he came back to the colony in 1953, he could not believe the change.

‘There was something different in the air. That’s the only way I can put it. For starters the place was a lot busier, more crowded. That was the point at which it became much more crowded every
time you went away and came back or took the trouble to notice. Noisier, more hectic, less sense that one knew what was really going on. More crime, obviously, and more of it hidden. Triads. All the Shanghainese lot pouring in, taking on the local chaps who’d been quietly minding their own business. Kuomintang. Secret CP members everywhere. More fun. Not for a respectable married man like me of course, but more fun in general.’

Cooper had married Miss Farrington, now Mrs Cooper, in 1946, while on leave in England. They had two daughters.

‘Remember that business about opium?’ he went on. He was referring to the criminalisation of opium in 1949. This was a splendid joke, since Hong Kong owed its existence as a colony to the enforced sale of opium to the Chinese. There were rumours that those Triads which had helped the British, Wo and his associates prominent among them, had called in favours and
lobbied
for the banning of the drug – which of course sent the price rocketing upwards.

‘I remember.’

‘I once asked one of the bigwigs at Government House about it. Old friend of my father-in-law. You’ve never seen anyone get so cross so quickly. Chap literally was puce. Said it was the sort of question which only succeeded in casting imputations on the person who raised it. I must say I rather took that as a “yes”.’

Hong Kong underwent a deep change. People began pouring over the border on a scale which made the influx during the
thirties
look trivial. Many of them were people who had good reasons for fleeing the Communists. Some of them had good good reasons and some had bad good reasons. Shanty towns sprang up all over the island and Kowloon. We called the occupants squatters, which made their presence sound more temporary than it was. Businesses which had concerns in Shanghai transferred as much of their operation to Hong Kong as they could. A smattering of import–exporters, spies, former internees, Bank people, and other Europeans came down from Shanghai and, as Cooper said, made life more interesting. A Frenchman and a Russian from Shanghai joined Professor Cobb’s reading group. They were Prévot, an untidy French left-winger, and Zhukovsky, a neat White Russian, and they often argued – something hitherto not in the atmosphere of the occasion. One began to hear talk about the Triads.

Not that this was entirely new; but where people had once
spoken
of the Triads as something half-comic, they now became more real. They were no less real for being, to Westerners,
largely
invisible. Beryl Marler was a self-appointed expert on the
subject
. This was thanks to her company’s interests in construction. She had ignored advice and sold off most parts of Marler Ltd’s business interests. Her father had been a surveyor and she felt, correctly as it turned out, that she understood the rudiments of how the building industry worked. Rapid population growth meant more business and more cheap labour, both of which were good news for Beryl, who took on a large number of Shanghainese workers (she had several Shanghainese foremen). Some of them may have been Triads; or not; but in any case they brought with them stories and rumours about the gangs, which she collected, partly for sheer interest and partly for the pleasure of curdling her listeners’ blood.

‘People think it’s all mysterious initiation ceremonies, all that stuff about “overthrow the Qing and restore the Ming”. It’s not a bit like that underneath. These chaps ran China. Sun Yat-Sen was a Triad. Chiang Kai-Shek is a Triad. It’s not some picturesque thing from the past, devoted to secrecy for its own sake. It’s more like a cross between the Mafia and the masons and the Hongs all mixed up.’

‘Yes, Beryl, very good, we’ll all be murdered in our beds.’

One day in November 1949, shortly after the Communist victory, Beryl and I had lunch at the Empire. Our new Shanghainese chef, Ah Ng – who preferred to be known by his English name, Peter – was settling in well. We had onion soup followed by grouper
à la
meunière
. Afterwards we walked a little way west towards Kennedy Town, Beryl for the exercise and me to clear my head after three half-pints of gin and tonic. It was not a warm day. Food carts and street vendors were busy. As we headed east past Central Market the streets narrowed and the buildings crowded together. We were arm in arm. There was a smell of fish oil in the alley, and laundry hanging overhead. A single sheet of
newspaper
, very cheaply printed, was caught by the breeze and blew against my leg. With some difficulty, after several attempts, I managed to kick it off.

‘Bloody nuisance,’ I said.

‘Now that’s a Triad thing,’ said Beryl, not in her blood-curdling mode but matter-of-factly. ‘A sort of gambling called numbers. Like in Damon Runyon. People buy these numbers in a lottery and then these papers are published to tell everyone the results. It’s not a real paper, just an excuse for the numbers printed on it.’

‘Beryl!’ I said. ‘How very Agatha Christie-ish of you to know that.’

‘It’s a big business,’ she said, quietly, pleased. We turned and headed back into Central.

A week later, after Cobb’s Monday-evening reading group, I got back to the Empire at about 9 o’clock. Ah Lo, the barman (a find of Masterson’s and, in the opinion of regular customers, maker of the best martini east of Venice), saw me come in and raised his eyebrows. I went across to speak to him.

‘Missy come see you, Master,’ he said. Like most of the staff he usually addressed me in English and let me switch to Cantonese if I wanted to.

‘When? Which Missy?’

‘I think she still here,’ he said and went back to tactfully
polishing
the inside of his cocktail shaker with a tea towel. Sitting at the bar across from him was Chief Inspector Watts of the Royal Hong Kong Police. We exchanged nods. He was in uniform,
sitting
with a pink gin and a copy of the
South China Morning Post
. Masterson had advised that a hotel should always have a tame policeman or two. His man, Superintendent Putnam, was a clever alcoholic who had been an important figure in Stanley – the police were in the civilian camp – and had retired shortly
afterwards
. Watts had come out to Hong Kong after the war. He was a teak-coloured, teak-tempered man, a classic colonial policeman type. I never liked him.

I went into my office and there was Amanda, obviously not long recovered from a big fit of weeping. She was sitting in my chair behind my desk. For a moment I thought this was to do with us – we had last seen each other at a dance and had parted on a note somewhere between an argument and a
misunderstanding
after a mix-up about when we would be partnering each other in a waltz. But she was too upset for that. Her nose was red at the tip, as if she had a cold.

‘Amanda, my dear –’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I couldn’t … I don’t know why it … I’m sorry.’

‘What is it? What can I do?’

‘I –’ she broke down again. I gave her my handkerchief and went to collect two large sherries. She went to the bathroom and straightened her make-up. Then she told me the story.

‘The secret admirer. Remember, I told you about him, the
flowers
and perfumes and so on. It was a joke at first. I’d get these
little
gifts on Monday morning. And then sometimes tips for horse races, a card left on my desk with a horse marked in a particular race at Happy Valley. Never more than one. At first I thought it was a joke. Then after the third or fourth time I began to check the results. The horse had won. I checked a couple more times and it won again both times. Also the presents were a little bigger – a pair of jade earrings once. I had started by telling people, like that day on the boat, and also Mr Grafton,’ her boss. ‘But by now I was far too embarrassed. I didn’t know what people would think. Thing was, the presents weren’t always consistent. Sometimes they’d be there and sometimes they wouldn’t. No pattern. That was part of what was so confusing. I felt that someone was watching me and I couldn’t work out why.’